Controversial Opinion: Confederate Monuments should Remain · 10:31am Feb 24th, 2019
"Karl Marx's London-Memorial Vandalized for second time" from The Guardian.
I wouldn’t like to say who or why someone did it but it was clearly someone very critical of Marx & that part of history. I am just surprised that somebody in 2019 feels they need to & do something like that.
Neither Confederate nor Communist monuments should suffer vandalism or be removed. They belong in the public eye & serve as testaments to nations & peoples' histories:
There is good reason to leave the monuments where they stand, but let’s be clear. The reason for keeping them has nothing to do with honoring the cause of the Confederacy or the memory of slavery. Even though many of them were erected for that purpose...
The case for keeping our Confederate monuments has everything to do with preserving our history, the better to understand it...Monuments become part of our landscape down through the decades, & their physical presence testifies to the past in a way that museums cannot.
...not so that we can honor the principles of the Confederacy, but so we can understand & remember who we were & all we suffered to survive the Civil War & remain one nation.
...It’s not enough, they say, to add plaques that give greater historical context or add Unionist monuments alongside Confederate ones. That should tell you something.
...Although this trend is relatively recent, the impulse to destroy monuments is very old.
In ancient Rome, it was called damnatio memoriae, the “condemnation of memory,” & its purpose was overtly political. The point was to dishonor traitors & deposed emperors by purging them from public memory. Rome would seize their property, remove their name from public monuments, & destroy or re-work their statues.
"New Orleans is Wrong to Remove its Confederate Monuments" from The Federalist.
In Poland, the Law & Justice Party (PiS) unfortunately removed Soviet statues from the Cold War.
...Poland’s governing rightwing Law and Justice (PiS) party is bent on removing all vestiges of the communist system, even judges who served during that era, as part of a series of controversial reforms.
From statues to street names, the government’s strong nationalist views underpin an enduring aversion to communism, which it views as primarily a form of foreign domination [by the USSR].
...critics at home, including the liberal opposition, view the PiS’s decommunization drive as a bid to impose its own version of history.
"Poland Consigns Communist-era Monuments to Dustbin of History" from Mail & Guardian.
"Jewish Graves Desecrated near Strasbourg in eastern France" from British Broadcasting Company (BBC):
-Breaking news version of article
-Updated version of article
""Jerk punks" Torched a Statue of General Lee. It honors a WWII veteran, not the Confederate leader." from Washington Post.
...after anonymous vandals attempted to torch a statue of him [the WWII veteran] last week, museum officials concluded it had been a case of mistaken identity. They suspect that the perpetrators thought they were burning a memorial to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
In August 2017, protesters in Durham, NC, took matters into their own hands by toppling a bronze statue depicting a Confederate soldier that sat in front of the city’s old courthouse. A year later, activists and students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill used ropes to pull down the monument known as Silent Sam, which was originally erected in honor of UNC graduates who died fighting for the Confederacy...
"On Confederate Monuments, the Public stands with Trump" from Washington Post.
...a plurality of Americans (48 percent) say they disapprove of the decision to remove the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville...Only 30 percent say they approve of the decision.
"Majority of Americans want to Preserve Confederate Monuments: poll" from Reuters.
...54 percent of adults said Confederate monuments “should remain in all public spaces” while 27 percent said they “should be removed from all public spaces.”
...responses from 2,149 people, including 874 Democrats and 763 Republicans. It has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 2 percentage points for the entire group and 4 percentage points for the Democrats and Republicans.
"Majority of Americans want to Preserve Confederate Monuments: poll" from Huffington Post.
...a third of Americans favor removing statues and memorials of Confederate leaders, with 49 percent opposed.
...strongest support for keeping memorials in place came in the poll conducted by Marist for NPR and PBS NewsHour, which gave respondents a choice between letting statues “remain as a historical symbol” and removing them “because they are offensive to some people.” (Arguably, the question might have been better balanced had the first option been written as “because some people view them as a historical symbol.”)
...only poll to find majority support for removing some monuments, conducted by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, adopted a framework far more sympathetic to the monuments’ opponents...
"Poll shows the debate about Confederate Monuments & Flags" from Business Insider.
...poll found that Americans across party did agree on at least one thing: They said protesters who topple Confederate statues should be charged with a crime.
